Summary

The top-level objectives of the MobileCloud project are a) to develop a novel mobile “network” architecture and technologies, using proof-of-concept prototypes, to lead the way from current mobile networks to a fully cloud-based mobile communication system, b) to extend cloud computing to support on-demand and elastic provisioning of novel mobile services.

MobileCloud will investigate, implement, and evaluate the technological foundations for that system to meet realtime performance, and support efficient and elastic use and sharing of radio access and mobile core network resources between operators. Mobile network functionalities – such as baseband unit processing, mobility management and QoS control – will run on the enhanced mobile cloud platform leveraging commodity hardware, which requires extensions towards higher decentralization and enhancing them to elastically scale up and down based on load.

The end-to-end control and management orchestrates infrastructure and services across several technological domains: wireless, mobile core and data centers, providing guaranteed end-to-end SLAs and AAA as well as service mobility through the Follow-Me Cloud concept.

Besides the technological aspects, MobileCloud will identify and evaluate overarching novel business models that support the exploitation of the mobile cloud in various multi-stakeholder scenarios. The MobileCloud architecture will be evaluated in realistic scenarios and with a set of concrete use-cases, based on applications such as mobile cloud enabled digital signage. The evaluation will be done from diverse viewpoints, exploiting the well-balanced and representative consortium including leading industry from the telecommunication as well as the cloud computing segments.